Friday, 8 October 2010

‘Stronghold’ – Paul Finch (Abaddon Books)

It may surprise you to learn this but zombies are not just a phenomenon of the twentieth century. The undead enemy has been around for a lot longer than that, popping up here and there throughout history in unceasing attempts to spread their blight across the face of the planet. Don’t believe me? Check out ‘The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks’ for a record of zombie attacks across history, you’ll see what I mean...

Abaddon’s ‘Tomes of the Dead’ range also sets out to chart zombie infestations throughout history, showing us all that the preserve of the zombie isn’t just the usual apocalyptic twentieth century cityscape. Abaddon charts this timeline with varying degrees of success but I’ve always been assured of a fun read in the meantime; I can’t complain about that!

It’s taken me a while to get round to Paul Finch’s ‘Stronghold’ (some vague idea about saving all the darker sounding reads for October, there’s a lot to be going on with...). The cover alone pretty much guaranteed a read and the promise of Welsh zombies, from the thirteenth century, had me looking forward to getting stuck in. As it all turned out, ‘Stronghold’ had a lot more to chew on than Abaddon’s standard pulp fare and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing...

It’s 1295 and the Welsh are making their presence felt on the marches once again. A strong English hand is called for but the hand of Earl Corotocus falls far too heavily on the Welsh and their druids plan a counter attack the likes of which has never been seen before. The hammer will fall at Grogen Castle, a castle impervious to all assault bar the army that now stands outside its gates. An artefact thought to be legend is about to create an entirely new legend, an army of the dead that will not stop until the last Englishman in Grogen Castle has been recruited to its ranks.

Ranulf is the only English knight in Grogen Castle who disagrees with his liege lord’s methods but this counts for naught in the face of an enemy that exists only to carry out the wishes of their dark master. As each wall slowly crumbles, Ranulf must do whatever he can to escape but, as the ranks of the dead swell to outnumber the living, it may already be too late...

‘Stronghold’ is another solid addition to the ‘Tomes of the Dead’ series with Paul Finch delivering a fine tale that takes Welsh legend and twists it into something dark that oozes with sheer dread. While there was never any doubt that I’d be finishing this one off, I also found ‘Stronghold’ to be a book that somehow defied all attempts at being finished off in one go (no matter how much I wanted to).

I think the main reason for this was that there was a little too much concentrating on the ins and outs of Castle Grogen at the expense of the story itself. Personally, I knew that the story was set in a castle and I didn’t really need to know too much more about where various passageways ran etc. While a little description is needed to lend atmosphere to the proceedings, too much leaves me having to hunt to find the story itself. This was very much the case with ‘Stronghold’ which had a setting so detailed that the story was never going to fill it all...

As I mentioned when I reviewed Nathan Long’s ‘Zombieslayer’... If you’re going to write yourself into a castle, and surround it with zombies and no way out, then you’d better make damn sure that you’ve got some neat tricks up your sleeve to relieve the inevitable monotony of a long and drawn out siege. Finch gets round this in part with his ‘druid side plot’ which adds another perspective to proceedings and fleshes things out in a good way. At the end of the day though, we’re looking at a group of men slowly being whittled down in number and as that number falls there are less avenues for the story to go down. All they can do is stand and fight. There is also only so much you can do with ten thousand zombies laying siege to a castle. The same actions are repeated and this lends a rhythm to a book that perhaps isn’t the rhythm that’s needed... You could take this the other way and say that Finch has captured the relentless inevitability of a zombie siege but it didn’t quite work like that for me.

All of this is a real shame as Finch occasionally shows that he is able to defy these constraints and write a gripping narrative full of all the good things you would expect in a book from Abaddon. While the siege does grind on the fight scenes that punctuate it are superbly drawn and Finch does not stint on the horror that is part and parcel of any zombie media (although the throwaway remark, right at the end, about a ‘hive mind’ threw me a little; a little too contemporary for the setting I thought).

Ranulf’s character is also a good choice to base the story around with his desire to do the right thing constantly leading him into situations that he would rather not be in but do have the knack of propelling the story forwards when it’s most needed. His confrontations with Corotocus may stretch credulity a little bit (would an indentured knight really argue with his Lord that much?) but the intensity with which they are written make them worth hanging around for. If Finch was to ever write a sequel, and I think there is room for this, then I would be back to see what happened to Ranulf next.

While I found that ‘Stronghold’ did have its flaws it was also a book that I had a lot of fun reading. Another chilling entry in the library that holds the Tomes of the Dead...